"In America the goal of copyrights has always been to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." That is the stated purpose of the power given to Congre

"In America the goal of copyrights has always been to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." That is the stated purpose of the power given to Congress. The manner in which Congress has exercised that power since the constitution was drafted has been essentially a clone of the Statute of Anne, a British law created following years of heavy lobbying pressure by the publishing industry. The payment of artists comes secondary; in theory, the businesses that benefit from copyrights need to gather their material from creative workers, and those workers demand payment (in practice the people who create copyrighted works get the short end of that stick). "Of course this is done by giving the authors exclusive rights over their work" You make this sound like the most obvious thing ever, yet this was not always the case. Prior to the invention of the printing press it was common to encourage people to copy creative works -- to prevent them from being lost forever. In fact, the Library of Alexandria, one of the important stores of human knowledge of its time, existed because of a law that required books to be copied regardless of the wishes of authors. You brought up the progress of science, but most scientists give zero thought to exclusive rights over their writing. The point of writing a research article is to share knowledge as widely as possible. You can often find PDF copies of published articles on the authors' websites despite the fact that the authors signed over their copyrights. The only reason scientists ever bothered with publishing companies was that prior to the Internet distributing articles on a global scale required industrial equipment that publishers happened to have. Frankly, do you really think that a system which requires expert lawyers to draft contracts, enforce royalty payments, and settle disputes by arguing before a judge is the sort of system that is meant to protect the interests of individuals? Everything about copyright screams "made for business." That artists happen to be paid for their work under this system is merely a side effect; the real purpose is to confer an advantage to certain businesses, who (sometimes) happen pay artists/authors/programmers/etc. for their work.